Dear fandom, I trust some of you has deeper knowledge on this issue. Horses feature heavily in number of his stories, and horses often are given names and even personality, instead of being just tools of transportation. I know Tolkien used to train horses or something of the kind during or before WW1. What lead him to such position? Did he had experience on them beforehand, and did he continue working with horses after the war in any way?

Just curious! But every word you say today Gets twisted 'round some other way And they'll hurt you if they think you've lied

- is that Tolkien had no experience of horses before joining the King Edward's Horse whilst he was at Oxford. This was a territorial army unit; he went on a couple of training exercises but not much more than that.

He was never a horse trainer - this is a fallacy, whose ultimate source is a report of an evening with two of Tolkien's children, in a Tolkien Society publication. Michael Tolkien said that his father was a sort of unofficial breaker-in; whenever he got used to a horse it got taken off him and given to someone else. All it means is that, as a part-time horse soldier, JRR would seldom get the same horse twice. The horses did not require breaking in, nor any kind of training - they were loaned by local hunts.

Tolkien left the unit after only a year, in 1912, IIRC; and had no further contact with horses afterwards. .

As a battalion Signal Officer Tolkien would be in charge of a menagerie. Of course pigeons would be used to carry messages. Dogs were sometimes used to carry messages as well, but were mostly used to shuttle the pigeons in cages attached to the dogs' back or sides. The pigeon loft itself was usually a horse-drawn vehicle. Horses were the prime movers of the Great War, so Tolkien would have draft horses to haul around not only the mobile lofts, but wagons full of wire and equipment to lay communication lines. (Unless it was near the front lines, in which case the stuff had to be carried on men's backs, usually while they crawled on their bellies, and probably under fire.)

That was educational. So he never trained horses. That's very logical: I was wondering why he was in such position. But every word you say today Gets twisted 'round some other way And they'll hurt you if they think you've lied

But I don't remember any pigeons... unless birds of any kind count - those are plentiful.

Now the question remains: what made him hate the poor cats?

...he hated them because they'd eat the pigeons. ;) ****************************************** I met a Balrog on the stair, He had some wings that weren't there. They weren't there again today, I wish he would just fly away.